by Bob
There ain’t many brown trout about now, but plenty of rainbows, and if you don’t want to hang about, another way to poach fish is to kill a rabbit, slit its guts a bit and fix it to a branch overhanging the water. In the spring and summer, when it’s warm, it don’t take long for the blow to hatch on the carcass and the maggots drop into the water. The maggots draw in the trout and they come there constantly for a regular supply of food. Once they’re used to feeding there, I take the rabbit away and replace it with night lines baited with maggots or worms. In shallow water I use single-hook night lines – a length of fishing line attached to a six-inch peg driven into the ground at the side of the stream. The flow of the water will take the lines in to the side, where the fish are lurking. In deeper water I use a line with five or six hooks on and a stone or brick tied to the end as an anchor. All the hooks are at different depths and I catch loads of trout that way.
Other times I use a funnel trap – a net of about eight or nine feet in length with a round ring at one end, a foot or two in diameter. About a yard from the end there’s another smaller funnel hole. I set it in the stream; the trout go in the large hole and swim down through the smaller hole, but can’t get back out again. They all get caught in the last yard or so of netting – it’s a bit like the pheasant funnel trap, only with a net and for fish. I left one behind one evening when I had to do a runner. I was on a 250-acre farm up near the Sherbourne Estate, where the farmer was hiring out fishing rights to clubs and individuals to use a stretch of the River Leach that ran through his land.
Now, these so-called legitimate fishermen are only too happy to be unofficial wardens of the river when it comes to poachers like me – they have to pay a fee for what they catch. I don’t. Anyway, this particular evening I’ve been doing the rabbit trick on a remote stretch of water where none of the fair-weather fisher men were coming, because they tried it and didn’t get no trout there. After a week of eating the maggots that were falling from my rabbit carcass, the fish were queuing up to feed there and it was time for me to take the rotting coney down and throw in some night lines.
It’s starting to get dark and I’m just setting up the lines, watching the river run away, as if it knows something I don’t. Chuckling to itself as it flows, with little cross-currents and bits of broken water and backwashes and whirlpools – when I’m approached by four of these fellas carrying rods and reels and baskets and landing nets and little stool things to sit on. The fish’ve stopped biting in their favourite spots because I’m luring them away, and they’re looking for a fresh place to park their fat bums.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Same as you, fishing.’
‘Have you got a permit?’
‘Don’t need a permit.’
‘He’s a poacher . . . look at that dead rabbit!’
All four of them make a move on me and I stand my ground, to see which will be the bravest. The one who asked for my permit’s in front of the others, and I throw the stinking rabbit at him and it hits him across the mush. He starts to heave, like he’s going to throw up. The one behind him rushes at me and I sidestep him and he goes into the river, which is only waist-high. The other two back off, but there’s no use setting night lines here now, because they’ll only go for the farmer and he’ll call the police and all my work with the rabbit’s gone to waste and the fish’ve had a free feed.
But I’m not going to go away empty-handed, so I move upstream about half a mile to set up the funnel net I’m carrying in my bag. It’s not dark yet and, after a while, I can hear the sound of angry voices coming from round a bend in the riverbank that’s shielded by young sally trees.
‘Shit!’
They come into sight before I can get the net out of the water and packed away in my bag. It’s the four fishermen, one of them dripping wet, with a couple of young farmhands and the farmer himself on a horse, brandishing a big stick. But no police. They’re probably thinking the seven of them can deal with this themselves and give me a good hiding, which they won’t be able to do if the coppers are about.
‘There he is!’
They come at me and I have to leave the net where it is and do a runner. The fishermen and farmhands can’t catch me, but I know I’m not going to be able to outrun the horse.
After about a hundred yards, it’s almost upon me and I feel a whack of the farmer’s stick across my shoulders. I keep running and the horse comes alongside me and the farmer turns it in on me and I’m forced by its flanks down the bank and into the water. I wade across and come up onto the other bank and I think the bugger will be satisfied with giving me a swimming lesson and go back laughing to his fee-paying friends and tell them how he dealt with the dirty poacher. But he doesn’t. The horse is already in the water and coming after me. This bloke wants blood.
I weigh up my options and decide that running on ain’t going to be good. He’ll only catch me up again and, considering the mood he’s in, he’ll probably ride the horse over me – trample me into the ground for my mischief-making. The bank on this side of the river’s steep and he’s at his most vulnerable coming up it. The horse is neighing and struggling on the muddy slope and the farmer’s hitting the animal with his stick to drive him up. There’s a load of teazles growing along the bank, so I pluck one and stick it up the horse’s nose. The animal’s already agitated and now it rears up and sends the farmer tumbling off its back and into the river.
The others have caught up now and are on the opposite side. The farmhands go into the water to fish their master out and the anglers are throwing stones at me. The farmer’s furious.
‘Get after him!’
Without the weight of the shit-kicker on its back, the horse is able to come up the bank on my side of the river and I grab hold of its bridle. They’re all wading across now, all seven of them. The horse is still skittish, but the skill I learned as a boy, riding my father’s horse over the cricket pitch, comes into its own and I get the animal under control and swing myself up into the saddle and gallop away across the open land and into the safety of some coverts.
It’s dark by now and I know they’ll never catch me, so I dismount the horse and turn it round and whack it on the quarters, to send it cantering back towards the river. I mean, I don’t want to be hung for a horse thief as well as a fish filcherer, and I’ve lost my funnel net into the bargain. But these things happen from time to time and the world’s an uneven place, with many ups and downs. And certainly ain’t round!
Speaking of nets, I was doing a bit of beating for a keeper up Great Shefford way, who wanted to net some hares. While I was there, I noticed they had a lot of partridge on a shoot next to the long fields we were working, so I thought I’d have some of them. Partridge will fly, then drop down and run. So I got to know the direction they favoured to run in and set up a 200-yard long net at the end of the field. I set it very baggy, very loose at the bottom, then I drove the field down towards the long net. The partridge quickly got tangled up in the baggy nets and I caught fifteen of them live and put them in boxes. I released them on land where I had permission to hunt and brought them on.
It’s just a different way of catching partridge, other than with a clap net that we mentioned before. It’s just a different poaching trick – I’m not saying someone reading this book’s going to run out and start long-netting partridge but, if you are reading, it means you’re interested – for one reason or another. And everyone should have something in their life – something out of the ordinary. Otherwise it’s gone quicker than a quail’s heartbeat and you wish you had it all over again so you could do something different.
I’ve lamped for partridge too, as well as long- and drag- and clap-netted them – on a night with a .410. You can lamp anything, really, not just pheasant and partridge and rabbits and hares – woodcock will come up the beam at times too. I caught forty-five woodcock of a night out lamping. Or you can catch them in mist-nets – a fine-mesh net I put at different heights on poles. Mist-nets are used by th
e scientific community for catching birds and bats for banding and other research projects. They’re made of nylon and suspended between two poles, like a big volleyball net. When they’re set up properly they’re invisible and the mesh size can vary according to what you’re trying to catch. Of an evening, just before it gets dark, woodcock will come out of the trees and start flying around. If you’re prepared to wait for a few hours, you can get them in the mist-nets. They don’t fly high, just over the hedges, so you got to set the nets just right. Or, if you’re impatient and you’re quiet enough, you can get a shot at them instead.
Woodcock are lovely to eat. Beautiful – nearly as nice as collared dove. And it’s one of the best things in life to be able to hunt and cook your own food, to rely on your skill and not the supermarkets. It’s almost enough to make me want to send an anonymous donation to the Society for Retired and Starving Gamekeepers – provided they sign a statement admitting to their sins against civil liberties.
Bob’s already told you about the different ways to lamp. Now, when I’m out lamping for rabbits or hares, I walk the dogs up the outside of the beam. Greyhounds get very clever; they go up the edge of the lamp beam and in, taking hares and rabbits straight out of the quat. And Bob taught me how to get them to retrieve as well. Greyhounds ain’t natural retrievers, like spaniels; they got to be taught. But once I take the rabbit or hare off of them when I’m training them, I give them a biscuit as a reward. After a while, they get used to me having the kill and not them – they know it’s not theirs. This and all the other skills is what I mean in Chapter Six about learning all I needed to know without a formal education. If I’d gone to school, proper like, I might have ended up as something else – maybe an opinion-pollster, or a pickled-onion packer, or a private pension peddler, instead of being a self-proclaimed authority on the greyhound and the gun.
Skills like long-netting pheasant in woods where there’s plenty of them about. I make a little ride, cutting a place where I can run the net through. It’s got to be done clever, not like cutting a hundred yards of bushes out of a wood that’s going to be obvious and draw the attention of keepers and the like. Just clear an area at the end of winter or early spring and keep it clean, but not too obvious, so that when I set my long net up, it’s not going to get tangled with branches and stuff. I set the net up nice and baggy, early in the season – end of September or maybe October, when there’s lots of pheasants feeding together in one place, and they’re tamer. Then I get back out and beat it up with sticks and collect all the birds that get tangled in the net. But it’s not so easy once they get wild and wary.
Sometimes I long-net hares at night. I know the fields and where they like running and how they want to escape. I set up my nets and drive them and I get some – a few but not many. During the day, I can get lots – I got beaters driving them to the nets and flankers to keep them in. Of a night it’s different. I haven’t got much control. It’s dark and they can see where they’re going, but I can’t see them to drive them towards the net, and a lot of them get away out the flanks. I only do it in the dark if I haven’t got permission – if I’m poaching. I’ve even set long nets in the rides for deer – in the woods. Then I beat them out and I can catch one or two roe that way.
There’s other tricks too – a crossbow’s a handy thing if you’re poaching near the pens, early in the season when the pheasants are tamish – before they’ve been shot at a lot and beaten out of the woods. Once they’ve been constantly driven over guns, they start getting wise to it all and won’t be so easy to take. You hide and, when they come out to get a feed, you can get them with the crossbow. It’s quiet and won’t alert the keepers, so close to the pens. You can take the bow part off and put it in one pocket and the stock part in another pocket. You can use bolts that are pointed and go through the bird, or square-headed ones that don’t. My crossbow has a hundred and seventy-five pound bowstring pull and I need a goatsfoot to cock it. But the downside of the crossbow is, you can lose a lot of bolts and sometimes that’s not economical, because the bolts can cost you more than you’d get for the pheasant these days. Still, diversity, they say, is the spice of life and otherwise I might just have to build myself a raft out of empty soup cans and float away to the Fijian Islands.
I’ve used snares too, in case you’re asking. I’ll set up a feed bin near some thick blackberry bushes and the birds come through in a nice lot of cover to feed on the corn in the bin. I set up an H-frame made out of nut sticks, with single-strand wire snares dangling off the cross bar, between the bushes and the bin. You need nice straight nut sticks, quite thick, so they don’t bend. The frame’s got to be set at the right height so the pheasants go under it – the birds have to stoop down to get beneath the cross bar of the H-frame to get to the feed, and they’re caught by the neck in the snares.
Depending on the length and strength of the H-frame, you can set up half a dozen or even a dozen snares from the one cross bar, to up your chances of getting a few birds. But you’re not going to catch enough to get fat on with this method; you’re only going to get one or two every time – and that’s if there’s a lot of pheasants about in the first place.
There’s many snaring methods used for poaching. When keepers release pheasants, there could be thousands of them in some woods. They’ll be roosting everywhere. They can’t all roost up in the big trees, there’s not enough room, so some have to roost lower. You find, going through the woods, that there’s opportunities for snaring them at different heights. Or you can make a two-inch hole in the ground, going down a few inches, with corn in it and a snare set round it, or hooks with raisins on, and lots of other ways as well. All these methods will catch you a few pheasants, if that’s all you want. But I’ll lamp hundreds over a few nights with a little torch and a .410. No matter how many tricks you learn, lamping on a night is by far the most effective way – it’s hit-and-run. You see the pheasant roosting, there’s no keepers about, you’re in – BANG! BANG! BANG! – you got yourself a few dozen and you’re gone.
At the risk of repeating myself, the thing about traps and snares is this: you’ll catch pheasants, or whatever you’re after, but you’ll also catch things you don’t want to catch, like blackbirds and magpies and vermin like rats and squirrels, especially in hard weather when it’s cold. Then there’s the keepers – keepers will even put a pheasant in a trap, then lie in wait for you to come and get it. So you got to be careful on the approach – first scan the surrounding area from a safe distance. If there’s one watching, you’ll soon spot him. Then chuck a big stone at him so he breaks cover and gives himself away. It’s a game of cat-and-mouse with the keepers. I know where they set their own traps – a layman wouldn’t – so I go along and take them and I got my traps for free. But when you got a bit of land where you have permission, you can set nets and traps and snares up to draw game in, without having to worry about someone pouncing on you from behind when you’re not looking.
Another way to trap pheasants is to make a cage with chicken wire, with a funnel leading in. The funnel’s wide at the entrance, but gets narrower, just like the crow-catcher I told you about. The pheasant can get through it to eat the corn inside the cage, but can’t squeeze back out through the narrow neck at the other end of the funnel. I make those cage traps out of battens and nut sticks. I put a lot of corn on the outside to begin with, until I have the birds coming every day. Then a little bit of corn on the outside and a lot on the inside. The pheasant pecks the corn on the outside and wants more – he goes in through the wide neck of the funnel, squeezes through the narrow neck, and can’t get back out. I don’t set these cage traps in the heart of the estate, where the keepers are watchful – I set them up on the edges, where the pheasants come when they’ve had enough of being shot at and rousted about by beaters and dogs. There’s less chance of getting caught that way.
If I bring those pheasants onto land where I have permission and pen them in and feed them for a while, then they’ll stay about. I sta
rt whistle-feeding these pheasants early in the season – whistle them in and feed them with corn. Once they start feeding, they’ll keep coming. They associate the whistle with the corn – and they associate it with no danger and they’ll feed and feed and feed away. When the weather’s mild, there’s plenty of food for them, insects and berries. But once it starts getting into the winter, if it’s hard, the corn’s got them. I had a red post office van once and, when I went down to the fields to feed them in, one cock bird in particular would run four hundred yards after the red van, because he knew he was going to get fed. He connected the red van with food. I never shot him because he was such a character and he drew the other birds in.
The corn I used for drawing in pheasants and ducks and other game, I nicked that off the estates. I took it in a backpack, maybe a hundredweight at a time. They put tons of it down in feed bins – they might have fifty or sixty forty-five gallon feed bins around the pens, where they released thousands of pheasants. They’d all be full to the brim. Well, I went round and took some out of each bin and filled up the backpack. I bagged up the feed when I got it home and we used it for ourselves during the season, to draw in birds to where we had permission to shoot. So, not only did I take their birds, but I used their own feed to draw in those birds. I had a half-ton of corn in store at one time and I was using it to feed my own fowls as well as drawing in wild birds – more even than I could use.
So, you see, there’s many ways to catch wild game – or poach, if you want to call it that. Gypsies use catapults, with a metal or bone Y-frame and strong rubber bands for shooting ball bearings. I’ve used them too, when I was younger. You can get a few birds if they’re on clear branches and you can get a clean shot. If they’re in bushes or thick cover, the steel balls will ricochet and you’ve got no chance. It’s the same with an air rifle. Both of these are nice and silent but, if it’s too windy, it’ll put your aim off. Like I said, a .410’s the best. Don’t matter where they’re roosting – and you can line several birds up with one shot. I know the best places to set up and I’ve shot birds out of the same trees, the same bushes, for the past forty years. They keep coming there, and they always will.